There is one area of business Apple is more than capable of moving into, namely a PoS set-up for retailers. With the iPod Touch, iPad and Mini Server already in place, all it would take is a card-swipe attachment plus software to tie it all together and you would have a perfectly scalable system from single device right up to a big department store. What's more, hand sets and additional server space could be added incrementally as required. With so many of the pieces...

Cookies are only part of this tracking issue, there are also Local Shared Objects (LSO), aka Flash cookies. These ignore browser settings and secrete themselves in the Flash player folder in your library. I use Firefox as my main browser and the add-on 'Better Privacy' deals with them - as of today it has removed 5,138 of them! All placed there without my knowledge or consent.

Subsidise? I didn't say anything about that, I was merely making an observation. Yes of course it was the customers buying the products that kept Apple going, but without the distributors that could not have happened.Again, I was making an observation rather than a criticism. Business sectors come and go, and the advent of the online store now coupled with the Apple stores have made resellers increasingly redundant. As to your comment about retailers, there were Apple...

A little while ago my brother was building a cabinet with a glazed front. The store he bought the glass from measured it 16 inches by 24 inches by 6 millimetres. We just muddle along in the time-honoured British fashion.

I could never understand why Windows was allowed a free run of things throughout the PC revolution. There was Apple of course, but in the big picture they were a niche player, but why so many big wealthy corporations meekly tied themselves to Microsoft's mast seemed a bit odd to me. The guts of an OS are available open source, has it really been beyond the wit of man to not develop an OS as Apple have done? I do understand that an OS is a vastly complex undertaking, but I...

Here's another vote condemning the horrible experience of Dixon's. The response here so far shows that this is a widely held view, and in fact the push by sales staff who knew nothing about the products to sell their extended warranty regardless was so egregious it became a staple for stand-up comics at one stage. Strange choice by Apple.